The Nation - News from Sept. 25, 1989

Grief-stricken neighbors in Alton, Tex., watched as a soft-drink delivery truck and a school bus carrying federal investigators retraced the path of a collision that killed 20 students. National Transportation Safety Board member Lee Dickinson said the tests helped determine that the speed the bus was traveling Thursday on the two-lane road in southern Texas “was somewhere in the range of . . . 30 m.p.h.” The speed limit on the road the bus was traveling is 55 m.p.h. Dickinson said tests showed the school bus and the Dr Pepper truck could see each other within a range of 150 feet as they approached an intersection. The truck driver told authorities that his brakes failed and he went through a stop sign, striking the bus and sending it tumbling into a water-filled gravel pit.